As I have just been asked to prototype the front end application for the reference architecture that I have recently designed, I was in need of some help. Here is the thing, I really, really suck at Winforms coding. Give me a web application and I can...

Yes, you heard me! Apparently ReSharper 4.0 is now in Beta status . This has got to be one of the longest upgrades in development history - I was beginning to think that ReSharper 4 was never going to be released! I love ReSharper, and the EAP program...

I am a bit of a SciFi geek. There ... I have admitted it. No, not one of those weird SciFi fans that turns up at Trekkie or Trekker conventions (does knowing there are two terms make me an even worse geek???). On the whole, when it comes to modern SciFi...

Roy makes a number of accusations about the Alt.net community, particularly centred around their espoused ideals clashing with their comments and blogs. I respect Roy greatly, his blog was one of my first real sources for great TDD information, and he...

It struck me that a good reading list is always welcome to find, and while I suspect most of these books are not entirely new to you, I thought it a good idea to list what I think is the basis of any good development library. Start with these books and...

Code quality is an abstract concept again, and can be defined may ways depending on how you perceive quality. A good discussion of the many aspects of code quality can be found on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_quality Some general...

Industry experience suggests that the design of metrics will encourage certain kinds of behaviour from the people being measured. The common phrase applied is "you get what you measure" (or "be careful what you wish for"). A Brief...

Some reports will highlight lines of code as a figure to attach some relevance to, and these become measures used to establish progress. These are possibly the most misleading figures to use, in fact almost always within a well designed application and...

"Working software is the primary measure of progress" Fundamentally, there is no more valid measure for progress, than the working software itself. This only leaves open to discussion, the definition of "working software". Defining...

I got an email at the end of last week from a developer asking about Agile development. It highlights a few problems with development in general, and with Agile as a "badge of honour" that are worth exploring. It deserved a fairly detailed reply...

Prompted partially by some comments yesterday on my post on How to Make Late Software, Even Later , and partially by a discussion on the altdotnet Yahoo list, I wrote this long email. As it became an epic in its own right, I thought it deserved a blog...

I'll start by quoting Brooks Law , as no doubt you expect me to: Brooks's law is a principle in software development which says that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" . It was coined by Fred Brooks in his 1975...

Oren always amazes me - I think he is psychic! Whenever I have a problem, I almost always find Oren blogged about it a few days before - and today's bugbear is a perfect example. I started the day off with a really weird timeout exception in WCF....

Simple Without a doubt, simple code is better code - more really is less. To misquote Einstein, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler". Rarely have I encountered complicated code that needed to be complicated, even complicated...

I made a comment yesterday on the altdotnet Yahoo group to the effect of: Test Driven Development is All About Design, Tests Are a Useful By-Product I worded it slightly differently then, but I think this sums it up better. And coincidentally, Oren just...